Cultural Studies Abroad - A Discipline In Crisis?

Laurence Raw

To talk about “Cultural Studies,” and the way it has been developed in different countries in a twenty-minute presentation is by necessity an impossible task. Not only have there been whole books written about British, American, French and Australian Cultural Studies, but there are now academic journals—the International Journal, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies to name but two—whose stated policy is to solicit articles from practitioners around the world, and present them as evidence of the sheer diversity of approaches to cultural studies.

Rather than presenting an exhaustive survey of cultural studies in different contexts, I will therefore focus on the ways in which it has been developed in three places—Britain, the United States and India. I choose these places for various reasons: first, they are in different continents—Europe, America and Asia; second, they have developed very different approaches to the discipline; and third, to show a former colonized country—India—has developed its own ways of “writing back” to the West. Following this survey, I will present my opinions of how cultural studies has become globalized and/or institutionalized; and by doing so lost the cutting edge which gave its original stimulus, when it was developed in the second half of the last century. If the discipline is to become an accepted part of academic discourse in this country [Turkey], I believe that it must acquire that edge once again.

But what exactly is “cultural studies”? In the British context, it can be said to have emerged as a reaction to long-established disciplines, such as English Literature and/or sociology. It was deeply influenced by the views of the New Left—a group of people, including students and intellectuals from former British colonies, who moved on the fringes, and who hitherto had never occupied a prominent place in academic life. The New Left not only reacted against the Stalinist view of Marxism (which prompted the Hungarian invasion of 1956), but it challenged conventional British left-wing views, which tended to be dictated by the white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant minority. Thus it can be said that cultural studies in the British context was explicitly political and/or oppositional in origins, challenging established notions of Marxism; and even challenging notions of Britishness. Hitherto only those born in Britain were considered British; the New Left, spear-headed by intellectuals such as Stuart Hall, gave a voice to colonial intellectuals who came to Britain to study, and thus introduced external voices and perspectives into what had until now been an exclusively Anglocentric Left.

As well as challenging notions of nationality, British cultural studies also sought to give a voice to marginalized social groups—youth subcultures, young working-class men, women, and various sections of the Afro-Caribbean and Asian communities. Styles of dress, hair styles, music, and behaviour in discos and/or clubs were investigated, and “read” as symbols of resistance to the dominant hegemony. During the time when Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister (1979-90), when privatization and free-market policies became the norm, subcultures and subgroups of women and minorities became the focus of cultural analysis seeking to expose the impact of “liberalization” (understood, in this case, as a reduction in state control over welfare, or the economy) on the marginalized elements of society. Still the emphasis was on “reading” signs of resistance and opposition to the dominant culture.

In the four decades since its so-called “birth,” British cultural studies has been distinguished by two features. Firstly, it allows for a remarkable diversity of approach, and a remarkable range of topics. As well as popular and/or youth subcultures, British cultural studies has focused on images of women, masculinity and the history of sexuality; how young women behave at school, and how white adolescents react to reggae music; and the history of middle-class intellectuals, to name but a few topics. Secondly, British cultural studies has always had a political dimension. It has always sought to emphasize the value of politically engaged intellectual work. It has aimed at giving a voice to people, and encouraging them to understand the relationship between culture and the various forms of power, and thus to develop strategies for resistance and/or survival.

However, British cultural studies has also been criticized for its parochialism and its Anglocentrism. At a recent conference I attended, the majority of presenters from Britain focused specifically on localized topics, mostly focused on major cities such as Birmingham and Manchester. The topic may speak about working classes, women, black people and ethnic minorities; the majority of its practitioners are white, middle-class males and females. Despite its declared aim to be the champion of the marginalized and the disempowered, cultural studies has maintained a relationship with the supremacist, white, Protestant “culture and civilization” tradition; the very tradition, in fact, that cultural studies sought to question when it was originally established.

By contrast, cultural studies in the United States has tended to engage with the politics of social identity and an examination of the representation of cultural forms—through the media, for instance. It was rapidly accepted into existing academic curricula—so quickly, in fact, that cultural studies in its American form became professonalized. It quickly acquired its own technical language—drawn largely from semiotics and literary theory—and, despite its original anti-discipline credentials, it was transformed into a discipline. British cultural studies was founded on a New Left intellectual tradition; in America the discipline became an organized professional activity which, for all its pretensions to radicalism, could be safely accommodated within the broad area of liberal scholarship. The relative absence of a Left intellectual tradition further isolated cultural studies in America from its British counterpart. It became the preserve of scholars who hardly had any direct connection with existing political and cultural movements.

It was hardly surprising, then, that American cultural studies lost many of its Marxist assumptions—not least because Marxism came under attack from the postmodernists, who viewed Marxism as a continuation of the Enlightenment project of Modernism; another Grand Narrative, Eurocentric in origin, which could be used to colonize the world. Again, it is not surprising that American cultural studies has been severely criticized both by the British pioneers in the field, and by those who would like to duplicate the formative history of cultural studies in other parts of the world. The strongest criticism of American cultural studies dismisses it as a generalized form of textual analysis.

In the South Asian (or Indian) context, there are three different schools of cultural studies. There are those who, as in Britain, study the cultures of the politically marginalized; but, rather than celebrating their identity, focus instead on how they are sustained by the state, through subsidy, or through commercialization or broadcasting through the media. There are others who focus on what might be described as “subaltern studies”—the study of those people who periodically rose up against the British colonists, or, more generally “the people.” This group’s concern is to unearth, investigate and describe the contribution made by the people on their own, independently of the ruling élite, to establishing a subaltern or peasant consciousness. In one sense, it makes use of a Marxist approach; and has been attacked for importing western theoretical structures, and imposing them on specifically Indian material. On the other hand, this approach recognizes how history cannot simply be imposed by the state; it is also formed by and through the lives of ordinary people. The third approach to cultural studies is that pioneered by Asish Nandy, whose main concern is to make cultural studies totally indigenous in approach, using South Asian categories of knowing and believing. He sees people as “victims” of colonialism; and that it is his duty to increase people’s awareness of their victimhood. This not only applies to the colonized, but to the colonizers also: what the European imperial powers did in the colonies ultimately had a major effect on their own cultures. Colonialism transformed Britain culturally by suppressing and declaring tenderness, speculation and introspection as feminine and therefore unworthy of public culture, and by bringing the most brutal and masculine of British colonial elements to the fore.

The colonized people may be victims; but they can also resist the forces of colonization. Nandy suggests this can be accomplished in three ways: violence, pacifism, or by simply “not playing”—i.e. dissenting from accepted visions and futures. By defining what is “immutable,” “useful” or “modern,” the West silences other cultures to ensure the continuity of its own world-views, in terms of past, present and future. To break out of this structure, Nandy contends, non-Western cultures must define their future in terms of their own concepts and categories, articulating their visions in language that is true to their own selves, even if not comprehensible to those “on the other side of the global fence of academic respectability”—i.e. Western academics and/or critics. Non-western cultures have to do more than simply resist the West; they have to transform their own cultures into cultures of resistance.

In terms of the future of cultural studies in this country, Nandy's views may have a lot to offer. Cultural studies in the West—in America and Britain—has become a major industry; not only has it been professionalized, but it is now capable of attracting several hundred participants to major conferences, such as the one taking place later this month in Birmingham, England, called “Crossroads in Cultural Studies.” Cultural Studies now constitutes a major part of academic syllabi in universities; thus all students might have the chance to study popular culture as well. Cultural studies practitioners, educated in the West, are now working in universities over here; whether they be foreigners like myself, or Turkish nationals.

Yet there seems to be certain unease—not only here, but in the West—over exactly what cultural studies exists for. I attended a recent conference in England, where several participants from both Britain and Europe expressed the opinion that cultural studies existed simply as a way of attracting students, and thereby maintaining class sizes. Through this, individual departments could ensure continued funding from the state and/or private sources. Individual lecturers were encouraged to be “relevant” and “up-to-date” in their approaches, focusing in particular on popular culture and/or contemporary film and television, in order to maintain student interest. The political edge of the discipline has been lost; the sole raison d’être of cultural studies lies in its potential customer-friendliness. If this is another version of the modernist/Marxist paradigm, characteristic of British cultural studies, then it seems an especially pointless one.

I began this talk by promising to talk about cultural studies as manifested in three different national contexts; I end by suggesting that, if the discipline is to achieve any currency in this context, it can only do so by i) evolving its own approaches, defined by the Turkish context, and not by that of the West; and ii) looking at those approaches not in purely ethnocentric terms, but rather in global terms—how they differ from and yet draw their inspiration from other traditions, whether from the West or elsewhere.